by Jacob Hebda

When the artillery fell silent, the order to advance arrived. The soldiers of the White Company rose reluctantly from the understory ferns to probe the enemy position. They knew their lives were going to be spent to purchase intelligence for their superiors, but they also knew their fate if they did not obey: The bullets of the military police. 

Private Harmon Tedbi joined his uneasy comrades in line. He took his place between Private Lopsi and Private Hafti. Lopsi finished a final cigarette and flicked the butt carelessly into the ferns. On Harmon’s left, Hafti flipped through the square wooden prayer tags on his rosary, his gaze fixed heavenward, lips working silently. Sergeant Vopti emerged from the undergrowth and strode toward them, his straight sword drawn and extended before him like a yardstick. He dressed the line, using his blade as a straight edge to make sure the troops were properly aligned in skirmish formation, with four paces between each man. The sergeant’s eyes glistened with unusual moisture above his grim scowl. Somewhere to the right, Harmon recognized the voice of Private Selmi exploding into a hysterical cackle. Vopti spat out a curse and stamped through the swaying ferns to silence him. Harmon looked at his boots. He would be dead soon, he knew, and the good military pay he sent home would vanish, and his mom and his little sisters would have to sell the farm. Then they would be forced to find work in the factories of the great cities. He understood the risk he was taking when he enlisted, but he hoped he would have lasted a little longer to get more money to them before he died. Harmon’s thoughts were interrupted by another visitor from the brush. The regimental chaplain arrived in a tall, red, square-topped miter and processed before the doomed soldiers, swinging incense and murmuring prayers to commend their souls to the cool mountain glades of paradise. Then the command came.  

With the sweet smoke still gracing his nostrils, Harmon waded forward through the undergrowth along with the rest of the company, their rifles loaded and bayonets fixed. Beyond the immediate tangle of saplings and shrubs, the forest ahead was shrouded in powder smoke, not sweet but stinging and acrid. The steel blue uniforms of Lopsi and Hafti, four paces to the right and left of Harmon, dissolved into the pale miasma. He squinted into the cold haze, and, to find his way, he tried to reconstruct the world before the barrage began.  

At that time, their column had been marching beneath the dim, shadowed eaves of a lofty, yellowing canopy when the boughs of the forest ahead bloomed with white clouds like the cumulus of a calm, summer’s day. The metallic, grating roar of musketry followed, producing a crop of screaming wounded and dead like great, hideous fruit fallen from the strange and towering trees. In retaliation, the guns of the vanguard brigade wheeled swiftly into position, and, over the heads of the infantry gone to ground amid the dense ferns and scrub, they hurled fire and lead with a roar that made the cold mud shudder under the soldiers’ bellies.  

In the silence of that now-ruined woodland, Harmon never thought he would encounter a sound more encompassing and intimate than that of the guns. His own heart thundered against his chest as if desperate to escape the prison of his ribs. Terror rippled through the young soldier. At any moment, he feared, the spectral sheets of cloud that surrounded him, perhaps concealing survivors of the bombardment, could again erupt with stabbing knives of fire, and, this time, it would be Harmon and his company that would become the crumpled human fruit beneath the now shell-splintered trees. 

The ground began to slope gently downward, and the debris increased. Harmon found it difficult to look ahead. His eyes were forced to the ground by constant obstacles. Great clods of earth and stone excavated by the artillery and contorted branches torn from ancient trees, not to mention the irregular dips and rises of the slick, leaf-strewn mud, which were often hidden under the dust-covered, matted plumage of the withering autumn ferns, promised at every moment to send the soldiers sprawling. Even in loose skirmish order, the company found it challenging to stay in formation, and they stumbled, clambered, and sprang over roots as thick as human torsos and fallen trunks wider than a locomotive’s drive wheel. 

In the fog, a low stump appeared before Harmon. As he approached, he found it was no stump, but a man curled into a fetal position. It was one of the soldiers killed in the ambush. His tall, egg-shaped helmet, once polished gleaming white, was dirty and fractured, and its proud, flaming feather plumes were dulled by mud and dust. The fallen soldier clutched his stomach, and his face was buried in the dead leaves of the forest floor. Harmon knew that he would join this man soon in death. He stepped over the body with respect. 

Curtains of smoke parted behind the White Company and sent red shafts of late afternoon sunlight across the wasteland wood, setting alight lingering strips of smoke like smoldering mists. The great trees Harmon remembered from before the bombardment were gone, replaced by a field of timbers and stumps, shredded and flayed by shrapnel. Nonetheless, a lone tree remained unscathed among them. It stood beside a shallow stream clotted with debris at the base of a stump-stubbled ridge. Harmon realized that the enemy occupied that ridge behind the once-intervening trees, and from that fortified height, they had fired, producing the illusion that the very forest itself had taken up arms against them. By some stroke of fortune, this single tree escaped the shelling intact, with only a few minced leaves and snapped branches attesting to the storm of lead it had endured.  

As the White Company approached that solitary survivor, the weeping foliage of the tree caught the dying light, and the rust-colored leaves flashed crimson, like many thousands of splayed and flaming hands. 

The sight of these peculiar leaves ignited a childhood memory Harmon had long forgotten. Back on the stony plains of his homeland, little Harmon, his father, and their beast of burden, an amiable wooly white creature with a long, erect neck that little Harmon had named Sammi, stopped for water beside a creek that had cut through the rock. A small grove of trees discovered the gravel beside the watercourse and colonized it, casting a scarlet-tinted shade upon that cool and sheltered stream.  

His father gestured at the autumn leaves of the trees, which were wide as an open hand and five-pointed, with each finger-like lobe lined with large, sickle-shaped teeth, and he spoke in a tone of warning to the young Harmon Tedbi.  

“Whenever you see this tree,” his father told him, “be on guard. It’s called the Hand of Fire, and it grows at the limits of civilization. It’s a sign of danger, marking where the lands of the savages begin.” 

In these alien forests on the other side of the world, to which Harmon had steamed with thousands of other soldiers across vast, tempestuous seas to free a nation, he found the resemblance of this lone tree to a tree of his childhood home disturbing. From its distinctive leaves to its mottled bark, flaking to expose a trunk as pale and smooth as naked bone, the parallels were unmistakable. They even extended to the very enemy he now faced, cruel servants of a mighty tyrant, savages by any understanding who lay along the ridgeline ahead. 

The men parted and passed around the tree with leaves like hands of fire and disappeared into another rolling cloud of powder smoke. With each step up the damp, leaf-matted slopes, Harmon expected the silence to be violated by rifles and cannon. He figured that the enemy must be waiting until the skirmishers reached close-range before unleashing a punishing volley for maximum casualties. But no sound ruptured the silence beyond the grunts of climbing men, the jangle of their equipment, and the thumping of his own still-living heart. 

Just below the summit of the ridge, the soldiers cleared the last remnants of sulfur-reeking fog and advanced to that lip of liminal moss-clad stone. And yet, no defiant fire met them along the length of the ridgetop. Harmon’s heart hammered against his sternum. What are they waiting for? 

The skirmish line crossed the crest. Harmon aimed his foot at a round, moss-clad rock to vault himself with the others over the top of the rise, but his boot was sucked into the gray-green ball, sending him tumbling down into a nest of jutting, hard-edged objects and slippery dampness.  

Once the shock of the fall subsided, Harmon lifted his head to find a pair of dark, gray-brown stones bursting from the slope before him. He blinked. The stones became booted heels, and, startled, his hands groped for purchase amid the loose, unsteady bundles and sticky-slick heaps in which he landed. Harmon managed to regain his footing and survey the hilltop. 

He found himself behind a shallow breastwork piled with ruined human forms. Nowhere could he find a body whole. The enemy were killed where they lay, sheltering hopelessly on their bellies. The stony soil of the crest prevented any deep digging, so the enemy repurposed their own backpacks as barriers, piling them along with stones and scant earth to raise a makeshift wall to the height of a man’s chest. In fact, he noticed behind him a bulging, swollen pack topped with a moss-colored roll of bed cloth, slumped down from the failed defenses. What he had imagined earlier to be a stable platform of a mossy rock turned out to be a fallen soldier’s blanket, leading him to lose his footing and join the splintered corpses below.  

The soldiers of the White Company wandered trance-like among the dead, numb with relief. They would not die today after all. In the last lancing rays of sunlight, they stood like many tiny jets of blue flame, and their red-plumed helmets were like the cool upper tips of the little fires. Ashes floated like fat flakes of black snow on the chill evening wind. At the devastation’s edge, a skeletal, black-boned tree stood ablaze, crackling.  

Private Lopsi struck a match and lifted a glowing cigarette to his bleached lips, where the rolled leaves were pinned between his fashionably filed and gilded teeth. He crouched, exhaling smoke, and slipped his fingers into the clothing and packs of the fallen soldiers around him. Their astonishment at their survival ebbed, overtaken by the thrill of impending acquisition. The soldiers of the White Company became eager to claim trophies and booty before the rest of the army arrived. After all, they had earned it. They had the courage to advance into what everyone believed to be guaranteed death. One by one, the blue men hunched over the dead like carrion birds and ripped away clothing and gear, plucking any shining object of seeming value from the shattered remains. Even Sergeant Vopti, who should have been keeping order, fell upon the dead, and all discipline crumbled. 

“Hey, guys!” Lopsi called out. “This one’s a girl!” 

“This one too!” Private Ratni said. 

“What kind of army lets ladies in the ranks?” Harmon heard Hafti mutter disapprovingly nearby. “It’s just unnatural.” 

Harmon chuckled and joined in. “No wonder they’re losing the war.” 

He wandered among the dead to find a suitable candidate to loot. In the deepening twilight, a glitter caught Harmon’s attention. A fallen soldier lay on his back against the rampart of leather, cloth, and stone. His left hand rested on his stomach, where his loose-fitting green shirt was stained with a dark, round splotch the size of a dinner plate. A beard of thick, wavy, chestnut-brown hair, some of which was artfully woven into braids, lay in an unkempt spray across his chest. Beads of finely drilled white seashell and golden rings encrusted with discs of lapis lazuli and turquoise were threaded and bound throughout the soldier’s copious beard, relics of the man’s careful attention to his appearance in life. Harmon thought of the money this jewelry would bring his family back home, and he knew that he found his fortune. 

Harmon detached the sword bayonet from his rifle, slung the firearm over his shoulder, and, with knife in hand, he straddled the dead soldier awkwardly, keen to avoid stepping in the gore and losing his footing. He crouched slowly and reached out with a white-gloved hand toward the largest and most impressive of the golden rings in the man’s beard. He gripped the ridged band of valuable metal, and lowered his knife over the man’s once-beating heart. 

As Harmon began to saw through the hair above the ring, he became aware of a faint, nearly imperceptible pressure on his right arm beneath his shoulder. Attributing the sensation to his imagination, he renewed his attention on the ring. The last strands of hair failed before the insistent steel. Harmon raised his prize from the beard. 

Then he looked at the ring, and, beyond it, he met the staring eyes of a man still alive. 

Harmon froze. The enemy soldier’s eyes were green as a newborn leaf. His breath was so weak it barely escaped his beard. To steady himself, the man placed his left hand beneath Harmon’s shoulder. His touch was feeble. 

Harmon sprang backwards. The golden ring fell from his fingers and clattered down among the stones and fabric and flesh, lost in shadow. That soldier was an enemy after all, loyal to the evil Serpent Empire, and even though he was weak, Harmon’s mind flooded with possibilities of treachery and violence. The cowardly ambush they made today and the lifeless soldier in the fallen leaves flashed again across his memory. It could have been this man’s bullet that cut down the soldier he saw in the woods. He shoved his knife in its sheath and swung his rifle toward the wounded enemy. 

Then, as he wrapped his finger around the trigger, Harmon was seized by a pang of pity. Again, lost memories of his childhood resurfaced, and he saw his beloved old Sammi, with his long legs buckled under him, one snapped and bleeding between the uneven sheets of stone upon the plain. His father had shown him that day that violence and mercy could be one, when he lifted his rusted pistol to Sammi’s skull and extinguished the animal’s final agony. Harmon gripped his rifle and placed the iron sights over where he guessed the wounded man’s heart lay beneath his baggy shirt. 

The still-living soldier of the Serpent Empire grunted something in the rough, guttural tongue of his woodland people, and, with visible effort upon his face, raised his right hand to his collar. Was he asking Harmon to kill him? Or was he reaching for a weapon tucked somewhere under those concealing folds? It was getting hard to see as the evening advanced, and Harmon could not risk waiting any longer.  

He squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. 

A dud. His heart constricted as his mind leapt to the realization. He wrenched down the lever under the rifle and fished for the cartridge in the depressed, tongue-like panel shielding the breech, but he could not prize loose the cartridge in the dark.  

After a few tense moments pinching his fingers painfully against the intricate steel of the mechanism, his eyes flicked up to his enemy. In his outstretched and open hand, the soldier of the Serpent Empire offered a pale lozenge of polished jade bound to a leather cord and fashioned in the likeness of a cicada. Even in the expanding shadows, the radiant ornament seemed crafted from crystalized moonlight. The dying man said something that sounded harsh to Harmon’s ears, despite the unthreatening nature of the man’s gesture. What was he saying? What did he want him to do? 

But there was no way to know because the soldier was dead. His green eyes dulled, and his head slowly rolled to the side. Harmon lunged forward, snatching the amulet from the soldier’s drooping hand. He would not lose this valuable talisman as he had lost the ring. Harmon examined the jade cicada, running his fingers over the smooth back and wings of the insect, and he saw the night’s first stars reflected in its glossy surface. That thing will make a killing at the auction back home. Maybe even enough to save the farm. 

That precious object was not the only thing Harmon received that night. With the arrival of daylight and the return to the mundane tasks of camp life, Harmon discovered that, no matter how thoroughly he scrubbed his coat, he could never expunge the blazing handprint the dying soldier had left where he had rested his hand upon Harmon’s arm. By chance, the red mark of the open hand had stained those four stacked horizontal bars stitched into his sleeve, each bearing one of the four national colors of his homeland, the Republic of Steel, that holy land of liberty, black and white and blue and red.